Tuesday, July 15, 2014

My favorite Nightwish covers

Hi everyone,

After a longer break caused by some unpleasant things,
I return to writing, but this post won’t be very serious. Now, let me answer a
question about music. I was asked quite often about my favorite style of music,
and group. Well, I’m great fan of rock music.
If I begin to chat about it, I can hardly finish. I do love a lot of groups
from Hungary and other parts of
the world. My favorite group outside of
Hungary is Nightwish from Finland. What kind of music do they play? You’ll see it, I mean you’ll hear it. At the moment,
they are between two albums, and
two tours. They may be preparing new songs under the radar, so I have no information about it. I don’t feel
like writing about their past, about their
former albums. I would rather write about other groups and singers who
like performing covers.

As I mentioned I won’t write the whole story of this
group. I’ll just give some
important background information that information so you can understand everything now. (If you’re interested in
details, you can find them on several sites such as visit the official
website.) They’re from Finnland. The group always has a female singer.
The first one was Tarja Turunen with an
education in classical
music. With her, the group combined heavy
metal and opera style singing together. When she left the band, it shocked many
fans, but with the second singer (called Annette Olson – she’s from Sweden, so
the group became international) they could preserve their popularity. Later,
the second singer also left the band, and the present singer is Floor Jansen
from the Netherlands. In my opinion, the current lineup is the best one.

As they’re quite popular, several other singers like singing their songs making nice
covers. Well, when a group plays a song from another group and they do it
indicating the source, it’s called a
cover. Not plagiarism, because they don’t say “It’s our song”. On Youtube, there
are thousands of Nightwish
covers, and I have heard hundreds of them. I have chosen 10 nice covers
that I like the best. Why have I chosen them? Because, they preserved the main
important elements of the original songs while adding their own personalities.

1. Elina Siirala (from
EnkElination) – Sleeping Sun

In my opinion this is the best Nightwish cover I’ve
ever heard. Elina is an excellent singer. Originally she was an opera singer like Tarja Turunen,
but in the cover she isn’t singing “an opera”. It’s beautiful- I
was totally amazed when I heard for the first time. If you like how she sings songs by Nightwish, listen other songs
performed by her group EnkElination. Later we’ll meet the Sleeping sun again.

2.Rachel (from
Benevolent Demise) – She is my sin

Although my favorite English teacher
Rachel is also a singer, this singer is someone else. I do love how Rachel
sings this and other Nightwish songs. Her group (Benevolent Demise) performs
quite harder type heavy or dark metal that is also enjoyable. I love in this
version the way how the music is recorded, namely they replaced the synthesizer
melody with nice guitar sound.

3.Jenn PK – Dead
boy’s poem

This is not the very first Nightwish song that I come across from Jenn. She is amazing. She is
not only singing this song but she also made a beautiful video clip, so that’s
why I put here.

What is a collaboration cover? The music is recorded
by different musicians from all over the world. Maybe they have never met
personally, but they play the same song and the leader of the project puts
everything together. In this cover, we can hear musicians, singers from Brazil,
the Netherlands, Norway, France, USA, Austria, Poland. The lead singer
(Juliana) is from Brazil, you can find her other records as well on Youtube.

Vithor Morales also made another beautiful
collaboration cover of this beautiful song with different singer (Katia Iva)
and musicians. You can hear the
same song from different approach of genial singers. As for me, I can’t decide
from these version which one is the
best.

Both Juliana and Katia have their own youtube channel
that show their other records,
including other Nightwish covers as well.

6. Dayana Kin
(Collaboration cover led by MattismPL) – Amaranth

In my opinion, MattismPL made a mistake in his
description to this video. He wrote: “I was always wondering how would
"Amaranth" sound if someone sing it in more Tarja Turnen way,” as
this song was originally recorded with the second singer called Anette Olzon.
Fortunately, Dayana sang this song in “Dayana Kin” way, otherwise she wouldn’t
be on this list. In my opinion, there is only one singer who could do this song
in “more Tarja Turunen way”: Tarja Turunen herself, but she will never sing this
song, I’m pretty sure. I have
only one problem with this cover: they used too much echo effect, but anyways, it’s extraordinarily good.

7. Susanne Scherer
(MoonSun) – Nemo

MoonSun made some awesome covers of Nightwish and
other groups. They recorded the music again with only acoustic instruments such
as the guitar and the piano. Susanne has a beautiful voice, and she expresses her emotions beautifully. From this
point of view, maybe she deserves
a higher place in my list.

8. Miss Elena
House – Sleeping Sun

The first time, I
clicked off this video after the first minute. Later I listened to it another time, and I got to like it. Elena is very
young and cute. Her soft voice touched my soul. Her video is very nice. She
doesn’t have another Nightwish cover, but her other videos are also amazing
(such as Nothing Else Matters by Metallica).

9. Children’s
choir (piano by Dean Korpi) – Amaranth

Dean Korpi did
an excellent job writing the choir scores and playing the piano to this
song. The conductor is his sister Andrea Corpi. Dean Korpi also uploaded other
beautiful covers (including ones from Nightwish) on his Youtube site.

10. Alina Lesnik - Ghost love score

At last but not least, you can hear a beautiful cover of Ghost love score sung by Alina Lesnik. Her voice is very nice, I'm sure you'll enjoy her other videos as well.

Most of the Nightwish songs are written to be sung by a female singer with some male vocals, so I didn’t put covers made by male singers. This is the only exception,
because it’s so funny. This cover deserves the +1 spot. It’s a brilliant parody inspired by the DVD “End of an
era” (the very last Nightwish record sung by Tarja Turunen in 2005). I think
you’ll enjoy it even if you don’t know the original song.

After this excursion in the world of music, I return
to the nice American English in my next post.

Kate checked this post again. She is searching new students again on her ITALKI profile. Her lessons are awesome and enjoyable.